NVR bugs in rawhide

[Ralf Corsepius]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:01:50 +0200, Ralf wrote:
> 
>>> You don't need to drop %dist for koji build inheritance to work.
>>>
>>> It just looks much cleaner to inherit foo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm for all
>>> newer targets
>> IFF "current rpm" is sufficiently compatible to the antique version of 
>> rpm a package has been built on.
>>
>> If this doesn't apply you don't get anywhere.
> 
> Not _with_ %dist either.
Of cause it would help. A package's release tag would very verbosely 
tell you that a package is outdated.

>>> No.  Particulary for noarch data packages, using %dist bears an
>>> additional risk. Because it becomes possible to tag a package on
>>> multiple branches and break inheritance by building for more than
>>> the oldest branch.
>> To me, this is not a risk, but a valuable feature.
> 
> The packager is free to decide whether and when to do this either with or
> without %dist.
Yes, that's the status quo, probably because certain Fedora and Red Hat 
key people refuse to keep things simple and straight, but prefer to what 
I consider to be "outsmarting themselves" by making the corner cases the 
norm.

IMO, that's simply silly of these people.

>> => I agree with Jussi. Allowing people not to use %dist is not helpful. 
>> It's a booby trap which certainly will hit some day.
> 
> %dist is a trap itself - packagers run into it regularly, e.g. when
> adding Obsoletes and versioned dependencies, when doing trial-and-error
> fixing of old branches (without paying attention to the recommendations in
> the guidelines), when committing and tagging after a server-side update of
> the "branches" file.
Quite easy to overcome: always use %?dist.

It's the cases when people add/remove %?dist, which are problematic.

Ralf